Self-Portrait

In 1922 Landmandsbanken, then the largest bank in Scandinavia, collapsed, and one of the people caught in its fall was Wilhelm Hansen. He was an insurance director who had built up a collection of French painting at Ordrupgaard, his house north of Copenhagen, and loans from that bank had helped pay for it. Early in 1923 he sold more than half of the French pictures, some 80 works, and many of them went abroad, to collectors in Switzerland and Japan. This self-portrait stayed in Copenhagen. The Ny Carlsberg Foundation, set up by the brewer Carl Jacobsen, who had also founded the Glyptotek, bought it that year and gave it straight to the museum. Courbet painted it in the early 1850s, in his early thirties, and it carries no signature. He shows himself out of doors, bearded, a white collar open at the neck above a brown coat, against a green hillside with a patch of blue sky in the upper right corner.